SB Leaders, Laggards

Fantasy baseball players love stolen bases. Sometimes, that affinity leads to well-justified draft picks — who doesn’t want five-tool force Carl Crawford wreaking havoc on the base paths for their team? Other times, that need for speed results in owners employing a latter-day Omar Moreno, a guy who racks up big stolen base totals but couldn’t hit water if he fell out of a boat. There’s yet another type of player who garners a reputation as a “speed guy,” while perhaps not actually helping his team or fantasy owners when he scampers toward second or third base. He might have a shiny SB total, but he’s costing the club runs by getting caught too often.

Today, I’d like to focus on which players have been the most and least efficient when attempting a stolen base. To judge efficiency, I rounded up all players with at least 15 stolen base attempts in 2010 and ranked them in terms of their run value on SB tries. According to Tom Tango, a stolen base is worth about +0.19 runs. A caught stealing subtracts roughly 0.46 runs. So, by looking at a player’s SB and CS figures, we can get a feel for whether he’s helping or hurting when he tries to steal. This matters in fantasy, too — those CS’s cost owners runs scored and provide other batters with fewer chances to drive in runs.

Here are the players who have added value when testing the pitcher and catcher:

And here are the guys who haven’t provided any value or have actually cost their teams runs by getting nabbed too much:

Those looking to add speed to a fantasy roster should look at more than raw SB totals. When a player bolts and gets caught red-handed, there’s a price to be paid.